It is in this present period of history that we observe an upsurge in esoteric interest much of which includes, as is usual in such eras, false teachings and cunning disinformation. At the same time, the Seeker is being offered the data for the “strait gate.” It is up to each individual to understand the significance of what is being offered here, and to get down to work. Many workers are needed in this time in the same way physicians are needed on the battle-field. After all, a doctor is of little use in a society of people who are in a state of robust health.

New evidence, new knowledge, can change the entire foundation of what we think we know. And this, of course, is part of the very problem of the Grail. Everyone builds a hypothesis based on certain “knowledge” that may be available to them alone. Then, they become invested in this hypothesis – emotionally attached, that is – and when new information is discovered or brought to their attention, they not only do not WANT to hear or see it – they simply cannot.

I did not want to fall prey to this kind of amnesia, so I have gone about this in a more-or-less scientific manner. I began by collecting data. I had no idea which data would prove to be important, and I knew from the beginning that it was better to assume NOTHING and just collect and sort and see what patterns emerged of themselves from the sorting process. It was rather like the preparations made to put a large, complicated jigsaw puzzle together. One begins by sorting the pieces by color into piles. At the same time, if one comes across those which are clearly the “border” pieces, one then puts them in an altogether different pile. Once in awhile, while sorting, serendipity brings two pieces together, and those are put in little “sub-piles.”

After this process is completed, it is done again in a more refined and exact way.

However, the Grail Problem is not so easy. It is like having the puzzle, only someone has hidden half or more of the pieces. Not only are we going to have difficulty getting a full outline, even if we DO assemble the pieces we have accurately, we may not be able to determine what the picture truly portrays. Add to this the fact that someone may come into the room and drop pieces into your pile that do not even belong to the puzzle!

Yes, it is that bad, if not worse.

But! Not to get discouraged, let me continue with some preliminary remarks – keeping in mind always the process described above.

As the reader may guess after thinking about the problem of “putting the puzzle together,” the process of gathering and sorting the pieces as well as the details of the discoveries along the way are lengthy and tedious, but the conclusions arrived at were, to the mind of the present writer, nothing short of shattering. In fact, if a person CAN fully outline ALL the steps taken to solve so complex a problem as the Grail, they probably don’t have a clue!

Of course, in the broadest of terms, the Grail Quest is always personal to each and every one who is inspired to undertake it. But, in my case, I was not exactly on the track of the “Holy Grail,” per se. I was simply a seeker of truth – the purest and most objective I could find. After years of collecting puzzle pieces and sorting them, after the Cassiopaean communications, I began to realize that everything became dense as it coalesced around the Grail problem. It is not just a symbol in a story about knightly quests and their performance of feats of derring-do along the way! At some point I realized that this is the Secret of Secrets; the Grand Destiny; the gnosis of the means of uniting Science, Philosophy and Religion, as well as Mind, Matter and Time.

It took me a long time to come to this realization because my nature is fundamentally skeptical. I am constitutionally incapable of taking anybody’s word for anything – I have to “see for myself.” If I read a quoted source in a book, I have to read the source from which the quote is taken. If that source quotes someone else, I am driven to find the original. And, if I ever finally get to the originator of an idea, I am driven to study the life and methods of that person and to discover, if possible, the observations they made which led them to a particular conclusion. This is time-consuming and tedious; no question about it; but it is the only way that satisfies me; and it has certainly borne valuable fruit in the long run. Many ideas and teachings that other seekers accept at “face value,” I have long ago discarded as useless after investigating them deeply and finding they are built on foundations of lies and deception.

Skepticism, the ability not to be fooled, is important. But skepticism can be “cheap.” It is easy to disbelieve everything, and some scholars seem to take this approach. A better approach is to embrace ideas, to consider nothing absurd, and spend the necessary time to examine it closely and minutely. If you throw away puzzle pieces indiscriminately, you may never complete the puzzle!

But, when you find the flaw, even a small one, if it is solidly established as a flaw, you must be prepared to ruthlessly kill the idea and move to another.

“Scientific training doesn’t keep your senses from fooling you, but a good scientist doesn’t accept the impressions his senses deliver. He uses them as a starting point, and then he checks, and double checks. He looks for additional evidence, and for consistency among his measurements. A scientist differs from other people in that he knows how easily he is fooled, and he goes through procedures to compensate.” [Muller, 1988, emphasis mine.]

So, with each little pile of puzzle pieces, one takes up a likely starting piece and attempts to fit the others to it one by one. But, as I noted, it may be so that the “starting piece” has been tossed into the pile to lead one astray, and will NEVER fit anything! And it may take a long time to realize this. Many people never realize it. They trim the piece, they trim other pieces, they force and maneuver to make them fit! And then, of course, having done this, other pieces are found that do, actually, fit, and they crow with delight that they have solved the puzzle never realizing that the “keystone” will have caused all the adjacent pieces to come together around a false center, thus the primary object has been missed… and the REAL centerpiece will be tossed aside as irrelevant.

As one begins to study the subject with an eye for subtle “clues,” one begins to understand that the very words chosen in the numerous tales are designed to either lead to, or away, from the central issue. In other words, not only are the incidents clues in themselves, but the very names are as well. They are installed as helpers or hindrances! And, sometimes this can even be a function of the individual reading the clue. One person may be led to a proper understanding by the very same clue that leads another on a wild goose chase! The clues are in the languages, the words, but hidden like little genes coiled up in DNA, waiting for the right chemical or charge of electricity to enable them to uncoil and make themselves know.

And, there seems to be a deep connection between language and DNA. Abraham Abehsera writes in his “Babel: The Language of the21st Century”:

“Matter, Life and Language are three instances where infinite wealth has been achieved with very little. The variety of matter is the product of the combinations of about twenty-six atoms. The innumerable life forms of our planet stem from the permutations of only twenty amino acids. Third and last, the millions of words that make up human language are nothing but the combinations of about twenty consonants modified by some five vowels

“In the past fifty years, man has made considerable progress in discovering and deciphering the physical and genetic forces that organize inert and organic matter. No comparable advances have been made in the field of language. Why did English-speaking people use the letters L and V to express their LoVe? (and LiVe) What compelled them to designate the opposite feeling by inverting the same two root-letters to form ViLe? (and eViL) Finally why were totally different letters used to express these feelings in the six thousand other languages the earth has known? Our thoughts and our words are thus made of chains of letters, the logic of which escapes us totally.

“Man, the author of speech, is himself made of chains of molecules and proteins the laws of which are well known to us. We may well suppose a strict continuity between these biological rules and those that organize his highest faculty, language.(emphasis, mine) In other words, we may assume that the laws that rule his flesh also rule his speech. Such a biology of word formation, valid for all of man’s languages, …Is situated at the crossroads of not only all of this earth’s tongues, but also all forms of expression, such as art, science [and] children’s stories. (Myths) One of its fundamental rules is that words strictly adhere to the objects, situations or beings they designate. Far from being merely convenient tools of communication, words are thick, multidimensional, densely interrelated structures which contain limitless information.

“During at least one-third of our life, we revert to using words in such a universal language. In our dreams we may be called on by a stone or dialogue with a flower, a bird or a waterspring. Dreams are pieces of a whole language in which words are still connected to the objects they designate. Night is thus the time when man recovers his full faculty of speech.” [Abehsera, 1991, emphasis, mine]

In Dreams and Myths, man uses the universal language and it is in understanding this “green language” of the alchemists that we will be able to come to some understanding of our reality and how it is shaped by the actions of higher level beings (“gods”), and it is through this that we will come to an understanding of what the Holy Grail really is and what it can really do. And, it can really do all that is recorded in myth and legend – literally – and even more!

Very early in the Cassiopaean contact, they began to use quote marks in a rather unusual way; that is, a manner that did not strictly follow the accepted rules of grammar and punctuation. I became curious about this and asked:

Q: (L) I have been poring over this material and it occurs to me that certain words have been put in quotes for a reason, yes?

A: We put in quotes what we want further examined.

I didn’t realize then that they were going to be teaching me this “universal language.” But, I began to keep a notebook of these quoted words and my studies in their interpretation. I began with simply looking them up in the dictionary and discovering the fullest possible meaning or varieties of meanings. This then led to tracking the words back to their roots and discovering other words that “grew” from the same roots, and often this involved working in other languages. It was utterly amazing how connections became clear in this way.

We remember at this point that Fulcanelli has told us that the reader would derive great benefit from his little book on the Cathedrals, providing he did not despise the works of the Old Philosophers and if he would study with care and penetration the classical text so as to understand the obscure points of the practice. Naturally, we cannot possibly include a page by page examination of Le Mystere here, but there are a number of important points to be made just from this little aside.

In the first edition of Le Mystere, Canseliet tells us right at the end of his preface:

“The key to the major Arcanum is given quite openly in one of the figures illustrating the present work. And this key consists quite simply in a colour revealed to the artisan right from the first work. No Philosopher, to my knowledge, has emphasized the importance of this essential point. In revealing it, I am obeying the last wishes of Fulcanelli and my conscience is clear.”

Next we notice that most of this preface to the second edition is taken up discussing a “star shining on the mystic virgin – who is at one and the same time our mother (mere) and the hermetic sea (mer) – announces the conception.” Canseliet tells us “the star is the great sign of the Work.” Naturally, this is wrapped in parables, with a sufficient amount of diversion to occupy the puffers.

But, having said all that, Canseliet tells us even more. He comments that the reader just might wonder that he has spent so much time discussing the star, but the reason is that it leads us straight into Fulcanelli’s text. He tells us:

“Indeed, right from the beginning my Master has dwelt on the primary role of the star, this mineral Theophany, which announces with certainty the tangible solution of the great secret concealed in religious buildings. This is the Myst?re des Cath?drales, the very title of the work.”

The only problem is, for the puffer, these remarks are nonsense. Fulcanelli begins Le Myst?re talking about cathedrals in general, the feast of fools, and wanders all over the place. He most certainly does not begin by talking about “the primary role of the star,” this “great sign of the work.”

Or does he?

Yes, he does. Remember what Canseliet said? “The key to the major Arcanum is given quite openly in one of the figures illustrating the present work. And this key consists quite simply in a colour revealed to the artisan right from the first work. No Philosopher, to my knowledge, has emphasized the importance of this essential point.”

Well, for a mind that thinks in terms of Kabbala, ritual and mumbo-jumbo, there is no way to understand this. But, for a mind that thinks in cabala, the language of the gods, the birds, the mother tongue, the solution is easy.

If one opens to the very first “work of the artisan,” or sentence of the book, there is a “figure” given – figure = number also! – and that figure that is the key to the Major Arcanum – the number seven. That is to say, in the first sentence of the book, “the work of the artisan,” Fulcanelli writes? “The strongest impression of my early childhood – I was SEVEN years old?” ?and we have the “key to the major Arcanum.”

How to interpret the number seven? Well, there are several ways to think about it, but the simplest is just to find chapter seven in the book to see what it says. So, we turn the pages over and begin to read:

Varro, in his Antiquitates rerum humanorum, recalls the legend of Aeneas saving his father and his household gods from the flames of Troy and, after long wanderings, arriving at the fields of Laurentum…”

And we stop to read the footnote: (Laurente- Laurentium is cabalistically l’or ente, or grafted gold)

… Continuing with the text: “the goal of his journey. He gives the following explanation:

“After his departure from Troy, he saw every day and ruling the day the Star of Venus, until he arrived at the fields of Laurentum, where he ceased to see it. This fact made him realize that these were the lands allotted by destiny.”

Indeed we have found a star that is the “great sign of the work,” leading to a color: GOLD. We have the figure seven which takes us to a color and then, to confirm that we have made the correct interpretation, we find that a star, which was the major part of the discussion of the second preface, is the guide to the “fields of Laurentum,” or gold. This paragraph is, as Canseliet said, The Key to the Major Arcanum.

Now, if we have a “lateral” look at the clue, what do we find? Taking the tarot deck out, we look at card number 7 and we see a most interesting figure: The chariot. And in that chariot, there is a man with a STAR ON HIS HEAD. What is more, the chariot is harnessed to two figures, one black and one white, one male and one female.

We then understand that the term “Major Arcanum” refers to the “Great Work.” That’s cabala, not Kabbala. And part of that key is related to the legend of Aeneas, the burning of Troy, and the fields of Laurentum – the Dwellings of the Mystics.

And then, finally, we look at “green.” Green — IE base “ghro” — to become. So, what we have found is that a great many ideas come into play in considering the “Emerald Tablets,” and this will later become very important.

Getting back to word studies in general, I noticed that, very often, a word that began with a specific meaning, became reversed over time. I also noted that the various alphabets in used by human beings, had certain relationships that were either similar or antagonistic. I also discovered that, at a certain point, letters were added to several 22 letter alphabets to make them 24 letter alphabets, and at about the same time, the zodiac was tinkered with, a sign was added and another one split in two. And, this very period of time was related to all of the issues that led to the problem of the Grail. It became clear that someone or some force or tendency was at work here which resulted in the “Babel Syndrome,” as I came to call it. I could see the “tracks” of some influence that was determined to make the solution of the mystery as difficult as possible by tossing extra puzzle pieces into the pile; pieces that would lead generations of searchers astray. I had the following exchange with the C’s on this:

Q: Well, I think that a HUGE key is in the tracking of the languages…

A: The roots of all languages are identical…

Q: What do you mean?

A: Your origin.

Q: You mean Orion?

A: Interesting the word root similarity, yes?

Q: Well, the word root similarities of a LOT of things are VERY interesting! It is AMAZING the things I have discovered by tracking word roots…

“It is estimated that there are between 5,000 and 10,000 different languages in the world (the discrepancy between these two figures is due to the different criteria used by various linguists in defining a language as more than a local variant or dialect of another), a fact which echoes the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. But, was there ever a single language in our remote past that preceded the confusion of tongues, and if so, is there any chance that we may be able to rediscover this Edenic state of communication?

…Danish linguist Holger Pedersen had expressed the opinion that there was a definite relationship between the supposedly distinct and independent language families of Indo-European, Semitic, Uralic, Altaic and even Eskimo-Aleut. On the basis of these links he believed that all these language groups were in fact descended from a remote language ancestral to them all which he called Nostratic, from the Latin noster, meaning ‘our.’

“In Proto-Indo-European there are many words associated with agriculture and husbandry [suggesting a farming economy]. On the other hand, among the 2,000 roots of the Proto-Nostratic lexical stock, we do not find words suggesting acquaintance with agriculture or husbandry, but we do find many terms associated with hunting and food gathering.

… We may suggest that Proto-Nostratic belongs to the period prior to the ‘Neolithic revolution,’ while most of its descendent languages belong to the Neolithic epoch of food-producing economy.

“…The most ancient centre of Neolithic economy in western Eurasia was situated in southwest Asia [which leads to] a preliminary hypothesis that Proto-Nostratic was spoken in southwest Asia at a period prior to the ‘Neolithic revolution,’ while most of its daughter-languages belong to the Neolithic epoch, and their spread over large territories of Eurasia and Africa was connected with the demographic explosion caused by the ‘Neolithic revolution.’

“The implications of the Nostratic hypothesis are mind-boggling. The theory proposes that most of the peoples of Europe and those in a large part of western Asia and parts of Africa were speaking Nostratic languages way back in prehistory, before the advent of agriculture.

“…The project of reconstructing the vocabulary of the Nostratic language takes us deeper into prehistory, back to the Upper Paleolithic period, the latter part of the Old Stone Age! If the Nostratic language hypothesis is right, then it must be more than 10,000 years old and is likely to be nearer 15,000 years old.

“[There is also an equally if not more controversial proposal.] This is the Dene-Sino-Caucasian language proposed by Starostin and other linguists that includes languages as diverse as Basque, Chinese, Sumerian and Haida. If [this] is shown to be a genuine language group, then is must, like Nostratic and Eurasiatic, be of Upper Paleolithic age. […]

[Researchers] believe that they can identify correspondence between even these vast groups and are seeking to reconstruct the primordial ancestor of all the world’s languages, a language called either Proto-Global or Proto-World. [Rudgley, 1999]

Farmers vs. hunter gatherers. Hmmm… This event of “separation of the languages” seems to be intimately connected to the conflict between the Shepherd and the Farmer. As I was reading through all the myths, I was struck by this conflict and also how an older “shepherd” myth was often transformed into an “agriculture” myth with concomitant reversal of imagery and meaning. I asked the Cassiopaeans about this:

Q: One thing I do want to understand, since it is involved in all of this, is the idea of the ‘Shepherd.’ All of the ancient legends and stories and myths

lead, ultimately, to something about the ‘shepherd,’ or the ‘Shepherd King.’

A: Shepherd is most likely to be struck by lightning, due to staff, and thus “enlightened,” or “illumened!!”

Q: Funny spelling! But, what is the contrast between the concept of the shepherd and the agriculturalist? This goes back to the very roots of everything – there is Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Isaac and Ishmael… and others that are even older from other cultures….

A: Are not you “abel” to figure this out? Have you not learned to explore your ideas without prejudice?

This transition from “hunter-gatherer” to “agriculturalist” is considered to be one of the great “revolutions” or evolutionary steps of mankind. But is it necessarily so? Richard Rudgley noted in passing:

“The study of the sample of skeletal remains from South Asia showed that there was a decline in body stature, body size and life expectancy with the adoption of farming. …Of the 13 studies, 10 showed that the average life expectancy declined with the adoption of farming.” [Rudgley, 1999, p.8, emphasis mine]

In addition, the Sufis teach that wheat was the “forbidden fruit” of the Garden of Eden which is still reflected in the story of the grain offering of Cain that was rejected by “God.”

But there is a much deeper implication to this and it IS reflected in the inverting of certain words in our languages as well as inversion of concepts as expressed in our myths. The understanding of this inversion could be the single most important concept to be grasped by the “seeker.”

At this point, I want to address a certain factor that the Cassiopaeans speak of: Knowledge = Power. There is a general tendency among both Christians and many “New Age” devotees of this or that “source of information” that a “Loving God” simply gives all to those who ask in faith. It is this fundamental perspective that we will be examining, so I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but I will offer the following remarks for the reader to keep in mind as we progress with our analysis of the human condition in our 3rd density reality. In the beginning, I was frustrated with the Cassiopaeans because they would not just simply answer all my questions. Instead, they would give me “clues” and send me out to do research. So, I complained:

Q: (L) How come I am always the one who gets assigned the job of figuring everything out?

A: Because you have asked for the “power” to figure out the most important issues in all of reality. And, we have been assisting you in your empowerment. Learning is necessary for progress of soul. Remember, we are not here to lead by the hand. We will help, but some answers are for you to decipher, and you have been extraordinarily good at this, since very early childhood. This is how you are building your power center. All there is is lessons and learning is fun. Knowledge is power. If we give it to you like Halloween candy, it is diffused. Why don’t you trust your incredible abilities? If we answer for you now, you will be helpless when it becomes necessary for you to perform this function on a regular basis, as it will be!!!! Learning now increases your power tenfold, when you use some initiative, rather than asking us for all the answers directly!!!

So, I set about gaining and gathering knowledge of the clues placed before me by the Cassiopaeans and now I share them with you, the reader.

At this point, I want to bring up two of the concepts upon which my “study method” is based.

The first is drawn from Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm, an essay by the renowned Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg. In this essay he describes a crucial aspect of investigations of the “unknown,” which can range from criminal investigations to paraphysical to physical, including history. This approach is, in a nutshell, the “close and careful study of seemingly trivial or unimportant details which actually turn out to be of great importance.” It is, in my mind, the “Sherlock Holmes School of Knowledge.” In the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dr. Watson, an intelligent but pedestrian thinker, is contrasted to Holmes, who pursues unusual and “inspired” analyses of seemingly irrelevant details such as cigarette ash.

The most striking thing about Sherlock Holmes was his unparalleled guile. His success was based more on his ability to think like his quarry than the tiny clues themselves. The clues were meaningless without context, and the context was in the mind of Sherlock Holmes. He KNEW his quarry. Based on this Holmes could hypothetically reconstruct the activities using only tiny traces left as clues. And, having reconstructed a particular action, he was then able to “predict” the next move, or where to look for the next tiny trace.

In terms of the Grail Quest, it is paramount to understand the conditions of the quest. The allegories of a “haunted forest” and “fire breathing dragon” and “beautiful temptress” are not placed in the context for no reason! There IS an opponent; one who tricks by terror, by frontal assault, and by unparalleled deceit! Make no mistake about it: there are forces that do NOT want anyone to discover the secret! And they are so unbelievably ancient, deeply cunning, and consciously evil, that the human mind cannot plumb the depths of this guile.

Tracking is not simply an “intellectual” practice, it involves considerable, often great, learning and inspired insight. The “reader of signs” must KNOW HIS QUARRY because, rarely does he have a simple set of complete tracks. He has to identify the action based on partial signs that most likely have been deliberately obscured. It was in the process of interacting with the COINTELPRO agents previously described, leading to the research outlined in the Adventures Series, that teaches us the nature of those who will obfuscate as well as their deceptions. Without the ability to strip away the lies told by such agents – through time and space – the seeker has no ability to reveal the truth.

In historical and metaphysical research one must systematically collect data. Unfortunately, the conditions are the worst possible for the quest for truth due to the fact that not only is the trail “cold,” but, in addition to the deliberate attempts to conceal the trail, there are many “Dr. Watsons” out there bumbling along and destroying information in their well-meaning, but misguided attempts to find the answer in the data that has clearly been left to deliberately lead AWAY from the truth.

In this sense, religion and myth are as important as actual material clues, but not in the sense that they are generally understood. This brings us to the second part of the study method.

In 1984, Thomas A. Sebeok was commissioned by the Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation and a group of other institutions, to elaborate answers to a a question posed by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The American government had chosen several desert areas in the US for the burial of nuclear waste. The idea was that it was easy to protect it from intrusions at the present time, but since they were dealing with deadly elements which had half-lives of ten thousand years or more, how to protect people in the future from destroying humanity by dangerous intrusions into such areas? Ten thousand years is more than enough time for great empires and civilizations to rise and perish. In just a few centuries after the last pharaoh had disappeared, the knowledge of how to read hieroglyphs had disappeared as well, so it is conceivable that mankind could be reduced to a “dark age” existence that came into being following the decline of the Golden Age of Greece, and the fall of the Roman Empire. The question was: How will we warn the future about the danger? Umberto Eco discusses Sebeok’s findings in The Search for the Perfect Language:

“Almost immediately, Sebeok discarded the possibility of any type of verbal communication, of electric signals as needing a constant power supply, of olfactory messages as being of brief duration, and of any sort of ideogram based on convention. Even a pictographic language seemed problematic.

Sebeok analysed an image from an ancient primitive culture where one can certainly recognize human figures, but it is hard to say what they are doing – dancing, fighting, or hunting?

“Another solution would be to establish temporal segments of three generations each, (calculating that, in any civilization, language will not alter beyond recognition between grandparents and grandchildren), giving instructions that, at the end of each segment, the message would be reformulated, adapting it to the semiotic conventions prevailing at the moment. But even this solution presupposes precisely the sort of social continuity that the original question had put into doubt.

Another solution was to fill up the entire zone with messages in all known languages and semiotic systems, reasoning that it was statistically probable that at least one of these messages would be comprehensible to the future visitors. Even if only part of one of the messages was decipherable, it would still act as a sort of Rosetta stone, allowing the visitors to translate all the rest. Yet even this solution presupposed a form of cultural continuity, however weak it would be.

“The only remaining solution was to institute a sort of ‘priesthood’ of nuclear scientists, anthropologists, linguists and psychologists supposed to perpetuate itself by co-opting new members. This caste would keep alive the knowledge of the danger, creating myths and legends about it. Even though, in the passage of time, these ‘priests’ would probably lose a precise notion of the peril that they were committed to protect humanity from, there would still survive, even in a future state of barbarism, obscure but efficacious taboos.

“It is curious to see that, having been presented with a choice of various types of universal language, the choice finally fell on a ‘narrative’ solution, thus re-proposing what REALLY DID HAPPEN MILLENNIA AGO (my emphasis). Egyptian has disappeared, as well as any other perfect and holy primordial language, and what remains of all this is only myths, tales without a code, or whose code has long been lost. Yet they are still capable of keeping us in a state of vigil in our desperate effort at decipherment. [Eco, 1997]

It is extraordinarily significant to me that Professor Eco has suggested so clearly here, the idea that our ancient ancestors may have been faced with the knowledge of a very great peril to mankind and “brain-stormed” for a solution as to how to transmit this information to future generations.

And it is with this idea, that we come back to the myths that formed the foundation for said religions and form a “working hypothesis” that such stories are the “narratives” provided by our ancestors to warn us about something, as defined by Mr. Thomas Sebeok in his report to the Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation.

It is here that we find the conflict between the Dr. Watson’s of the archaeological/historical world and the Sherlocks. We cannot just read this myths and discover the answer. We have to deeply analyze the stories, discover the various versions and their inversions; and, by tracking the roots of words, discover their relations to the “universal language of the subconscious.” In such a way, we just MIGHT be able to discover what it is our ancestors knew and what they have so desperately tried to tell us which some other force has also desperately tried to conceal from us!

Among mainstream scientists, most particularly those who study the past, there is a strong fundamental bias based on the ideas of social progress and evolution – uniformitarianism. This bias seems to compel such “experts” to write their own myths of history. In these myths, the plot is always similar: modern civilization is a great success story from the prehistoric “rags” to the present technological “riches,” with modern science scripted for the role of the heroic “flower of human achievement” born out of the long struggle against the powers of the evil ignorance of our Stone Age ancestors! They still believe and teach that civilization suddenly “appeared” 5,000 years ago – that there was a “quantum leap forward” based on previous, interminable steps on the ladder to true progress. This idea formation can be easily seen as the “Dr. Watson school of history.”

In the religious myths there are several universal themes, the most prevalent being that of a Golden Age which was destroyed in some terrible way – a deluge, a fall from grace, a punishment. The Dr. Watson School ascribes such stories to any number of theories based on the fearful and ignorant state of the howling savages of the Stone Age who imaginatively created such things to explain the inexplicable forces of nature around them. But, we are going to look at them in a different way.

Since mainstream scientists and historians haven’t done a whole lot toward explaining the order of the universe in such a way that that has led to true progress, I propose that we try to look at things a little bit differently.

Let me explain.

Our world is generally explained in reductionist terms which amounts to the outlook of science. Science has “explained away” everything by reducing it to its component parts which are mechanistic and lacking some essential thing that gives “life” to our lives. Science explains religion as “wishful-thinking” and love as NOTHING more than chemistry between the cells of the body. Progressive “scientism” is equated with reason and reason is supposed to make man a “godlike” being, at least in terms of his ethics. But, it isn’t working. You can look around you and SEE that it isn’t working. We live in a horror house of technological doom, feeling powerless to do anything about our state of existence. The plain, hard fact is: science, alone, can’t lead us to the explanation of the order of the universe and, in the face of our present reality, the ONLY rational thing we can do is look elsewhere for our answers.

Now, how do we do this?

The first step might be to challenge this most fundamental of scientific ideas: that scientific progress is as “progressive” or “evolutionary” as is claimed; that mankind has evolved from naked savages to his modern state of technological prowess; that we are moving from a lower state of ignorance to a higher state of advancement. Yes, we admit that progress HAS occurred in many ways at many times, but this does not seem to be the norm of nature. A hybridized plant, left alone to go to seed for several seasons will revert to the unhybridized form. And just so, the history of man seems to be one of degeneration alternating with recovery and technological advancement which is NOT balanced by ethical or spiritual development. Science and religion have run amok into narrow and distorted views of the universe. Something is wrong with this picture, and just what it is we need to discover.

The theme of the Quest for the Grail has several variations on a singular idea: that far back in the ancient past, there was knowledge, True Wisdom Technology. Further, there is the idea that this knowledge was widely known and applied in a Golden Age. The Ancient Technology is further thought to have survived, though perhaps broken up and obscured in “magical doctrines,” myths and religious rituals that have long ago lost their meaning. It is also thought that the Ancient Technology has survived in esoteric schools, nurtured in secret, and given out to the world in measured doses from time to time via an elect few who feel sorry for mankind.

According to Newton, the Greek mystics who spoke of the “music of the spheres, were merely talking about gravity. His idea was that the strings of Apollo’s lyre corresponded to the planet’s distances from the sun.

Do we have any evidence that this Ancient Technology ever REALLY existed? I think we do. Not only that, I believe that we can track it back to a central point of dispensation where the teachings of scientific concepts were couched in religious doctrines and myths and these were planted in different social groups which then applied them in various ways. Some of these groups made progress; some did not. Some forgot everything and just tell the stories.

We are going to travel back in time. We are going to peer into the darkness of millennia past to detect the points in time and place where there were peculiarities in thinking and imagination and response to life that simply do not fit the normal “evolutionary” mode, and which suggest the remnant of the Ancient Technology. We are going to attempt to isolate clues that point to this Ancient Technology. We are going to gather these pieces together and assemble them into a picture so that we can perceive the reality BEHIND the picture.

So, as a working hypothesis, let me propose the following:

1. The religious myths that have been handed down to us are “narratives” of one or more advanced civilizations that existed on earth in the remote past.

2. That the inhabitants of said civilizations may have experienced a different relationship to their physical environment, including their own physiology. This different experience of the environment may have been an actual 4th density state of existence passed down in myth as “Eden.”

3. That this different relationship may have enabled such people to develop a technology that was not only superior to our own, but was also DIFFERENT in fundamental ways.

4. That this difference in terms of relationship to environment may have been due to the fact that the environment itself was different; i.e. 4th Density.

5. That there was a reciprocity between the human being and the environment or, as the Cassiopaeans describe it: Variability of Physicality.

7. That such an environment, as defined, may significantly affect DNA. We can note that it is presently estimated that 2% of human DNA is utilized and 98% is considered junk. Compare this figure to the proposed 5% of the brain that is in “use.” These figures are suspiciously close, and may express a causal relationship. It has been shown in numerous scientific studies that such things as personality may be related to genetics. It has also been suggested by research that psi abilities may be related to genetics. This is NOT to suggest that the mind of man is a byproduct of evolution, but rather that spirit and matter are balanced and symbiotic through the “interface” of the DNA. A different external environment might have engendered a different internal environment in the human being, in terms of chemistry, which might have had a significant effect on DNA so that greater percentages of DNA and, therefore, brain use, were available to mankind, and that this was the means by which the ancients “interacted” with their environment; they were “partners” in their technology, while we, in the present, “depend” on ours.

8. That among the abilities that would have existed in an “enhanced” or 4th density environment would be the ability to perceive the archetypes which are projected into 3rd density and the essential nature of 3rd and 4th densities. These “enhanced” perceptions included full knowledge of the so-called “alien” reality of today, and stories of these beings and their abilities have been passed down to us through the aeons as the lore of the “gods” and “fairy folk” and demons and vampires.

9. And, further, a terrible fate fell upon our ancestors so that they “lost” their “estate” in 4th density and this is passed down to us as the story of the “Deluge.”

10. And finally, that our religious myths and rites are remnants of narratives designed to explain the path back to this Edenic estate, including the pitfalls of the path, and warnings of the possibility of failure – the consequences of which could alter for good or evil the entire nature of the cosmos. Suppose also that there is a “war” of sorts being fought in other densities and dimensions as depicted in these myths. Further, suppose that as soon as one side gives “aid and support” to their “favored contender,” represented by different groups of human beings on the “gameboard of Earth,” and identified with certain mythical archetypes, the other side steps in and sabotages the maneuver as described in mythical dramas? Further, suppose that these “game masters” have time travel capabilities… they can go back into the past to alter events and stories, so as to reveal or conceal their true activities of the future/present as well as to plant information/disinformation that is later “discovered” as an “ancient artifact?”

If there is only a tiny percentage of possibility that such a hypothesis is correct, that this “alien reality” of 4th density as described by the Cassiopaeans actually exists, would it not behoove us to examine these stories, myths, and rites with a more open and “Sherlockian” mindset? So much of what has been handed down has become a matter of either “faith” or fable to so many people that a serious analysis for purposes of a solution is woefully lacking.

It was in following all the many threads of the myth of the grail that I realized that the tale of Orion was, more or less, among the earliest forms of the Grail story.

What does Orion have to do with the Grail Quest?

A great deal, I think. The similarities between the stories of Orion and Arthur, in essential terms, are many.

The Arthur of the Grail Quest is not, in a certain sense, a real flesh and blood man, but an archetypal complex of images. Arthur is other and more than the sum of his appearances in literature, and he is present in myths, stories and images that have NO direct mention of him.

Arthur is present in the myths of all the sacrificial kings, dying saviors, and heroic slayers of dragons from time immemorial. His story grows with every episode we study, and after a time, we realize that Arthur, himself, is only a clue.

Arthur/Arca/Arcadia is a clue to the mythology of Fall and Redemption: The Once and Future King. He is the symbol of the Lost Eden and the New Jerusalem, and his story has branches that reach out to embrace all the ideas of cyclical changes and power over the environment.

The Myth of the Golden Age: a period when the Pole was “Oriented” differently; when the seasons were different; the year was different; a primordial paradise where time had no meaning.

The memory or imagination of a Golden Age seems to be a particularity of the cultures that cover the area from India to Northern Europe. In the Americas, the most fully developed mythologies of history were those of the Mayas and Aztecs, for whom there was no past era unclouded by the threat of cyclical destruction by fire of flood. Nor does the philosophy of Buddhism have any place for nostalgia, although in practice it absorbed the idea of declining ages from its Indian surroundings. But in the ancient Middle East there is an obvious relic of the Golden Age in Genesis, as the Garden of Eden where humanity walked with the gods before the Fall. What is more, it is clear that this is a NORTHERN myth.

The Egyptians spoke of past epochs ruled by god-kings. Babylonian mythology, as reported by Berosus, had a scheme of three ages, each lasting while the vernal equinox precessed through four signs of the zodiac; the first of these, under the dominion of Anu, was a Golden Age, ended by the Flood.

The Iranian Avesta texts tell of the thousand-year Golden Reign of Yima, the first man and the first king, under whose rule cold and heat, old age, death and sickness were unknown. The most fully developed theory of this kind, and probably the oldest one, is the Hindu doctrine of the Four Yugas. Joscelyn Godwin describes the first of these ages:

In the first Krita Yuga, after the creation of the earth, Brahman created a thousand pairs of twins from his mouth, breast, thighs, and feet respectively. They lived without houses; all desires which they conceived were directly fulfilled; and the earth produced of itself delicious food for them, since animals and plants were not yet in existence. Each pair of twins brought forth at the end of their life a pair exactly like them. As everybody did his duty and nothing else, there was no distinction between good and bad acts.

After the Krita or Satya Yuga, things get progressively worse: each successive yuga sees the human race falling into increasing unhappiness and evil, until at the end of the Kali Yuga, the world is set on fire, deluged with water, and then reborn. [Joscelyn Godwin, 1996]

We may discover, in the course of this series of essays, that the “Arthur” and Grail legends of more recent times have been influenced by far earlier forms of the story. Once we decide to accept the possible survival and transmission of these connections in archaic myths, stories and images, the scope of our investigation widens significantly.

In order to see the relation of Arthur to Orion, and their respective quests, we need to understand at the outset that stories can be translated both linguistically AND culturally to provide meaning to their new “owners.” There is a story found in the History of Herodotus which is an exact copy of an original tale of Indian origin EXCEPT for the fact that in the original, it was an animal fable, and in Herodotus’ version, all the characters had become human. In every other detail, the stories are identical. As R. E. Meagher, professor of humanities and translator of Greek classics remarks:

Clearly, if characters change species, they may change their names and practically anything else about themselves.

Our aim here is to discover the truth of the Holy Grail, the quest of the Arthurian knights, the finding of which would restore “Arthur” to the throne. It is the same as Orion’s quest for the cure for his blindness.

One of the problems is that there are many “Arthurs.” King Arthur is the creation of one writer: Geoffrey of Monmouth, a cleric of Welsh or Breton descent. Very little is actually known about Geoffrey other than the fact that he taught at Oxford between the years 1129 and 1151, a most curious period in history. His Historia Regum Britanniae, or The History of the Kings of Britain, dated around 1138, may have drawn on sources that are unknown to us in addition to the ones we do know. (It is thought by many scholars that Geoffrey’s imagination was the dominant influence for this work and that may or may not be so.)

What is thought to be true is that behind Geoffrey’s Arthur is a body of tradition, some of it written and some of it oral; transmitted, for the most part, by the Welsh who were descended from the Celtic Britons, the inhabitants at the time of the Roman incursions.

So far as can be determined, the Arthurian legends, though Christianized, were fundamentally pre-Christian mythology thinly veiled in the personalities of kings and queens, enchanters and fairies. Geoffrey established Arthur as a splendid monarch and conqueror – the Once and Future King – representing the glorious ancestry and prophesied future of the Celtic peoples, reduced to bondage by the Romans and Christianity.

The Arthurian stories supplied a quasi-historical background which gave strong impetus for the discovery and study of Celtic mythology, and the legends took on their most familiar guise in the romances of the Troubadours of the late 12th and 13th centuries. These medieval romances recognized three main sources: Roman Classicism, French sources/ Frankish matters, and British Arthurian tales. The Arthurian source was so wildly popular that it soon dominated the field and spread throughout the Christian world.

The Arthurian “fad” resulted in the production of literature in the languages and art of the major countries of the Middle Ages due, it is claimed, to the Crusades and the mixing and exchanging of ideas and myths that occurred in the contacts between western Europe and the civilized Eastern countries.

Yet, there was an undercurrent of conflict between the emergence of these stories and Christian theology and the dominance/control consciousness of the propagandists of the early Church. It was during this conflict, that a revival of Christian energy was focused on the Holy Land, and the Arthurian myths of the Holy Grail were inspired. But, it is not really that simple as we shall soon see.

Knowing what we do about the emerging literature of the Holy Grail,we think that there is more to the legend’s enduring fascination than just the fad of the Middle ages. The story has appeared in different forms and times long before Geoffrey’s Historia began the craze.

As noted, Arthur represents something else; something other than just a British Dux Bellorum; he represents a long ago Golden Age, a time of social harmony and wise government, a time of ethics and morality, a time of the “Way of Former Kings.” The theme of the “lost Golden Age” is so potent that when Geoffrey made Arthur a sort of Messiah, combining Welsh myth and tradition with genuine history, he touched something so deep in the human psyche that the Medieval Soul took flight in hopes of the restoration of the Kingdom on Earth which could only be restored by the discovery of the Grail.

In a certain sense, we can think that the story of the Grail is the story of the creative potential of the human race in very real, though esoteric terms – the power to re-create the Golden Age – a pathway to knowledge of an Ancient Technology that gave rise to the great megalithic monuments for which no rational explanation exists – a power that has been hidden from us for ages past.

In discovering the True Grail, we may also find the source of the control system that has operated on our planet for the past many thousands of years, keeping mankind in bondage to time, history, misery, decay and suffering.

Because, after we ask the former question, we must then ask: WHO or WHAT wants us to be powerless? Who or What force or group desires – or needs – to control humanity? And then, of course, WHY? What great secret lies hidden from us that we are not supposed to learn?

Further, once we discover the hidden secret, how do we utilize it? It must be unimaginably potent for so much effort and energy to have gone into the cover-up over so many thousands of years.

I want to warn the casual reader that this series is NOT “casual” reading! It is long and complex and goes in many different directions that seem, at first glance, to be unrelated. But, I will also make a promise: it will be worth the reading because, in the end, it will all be brought together and connected in a proper way that will satisfy the most discriminating of Grail Questors.

Umberto Eco has written in his book The Search for the Perfect Language:

“It is frequently claimed in American philosophy departments that, in order to be a philosopher, it is not necessary to revisit the history of philosophy. It is like the claim that one can become a painter without having seen a single work of Raphael, or a writer without having ever read the classics. Such things are theoretically possible; but the ‘primitive’ artist, condemned to an ignorance of the past, is always recognizable as such and rightly labeled as a ‘naif.’ It is only when we reconsider past projects revealed as utopian or as failures that we are apprised of the dangers and possibilities for failure for our allegedly new projects. The study of the deeds of our ancestors is thus more than an antiquarian pastime, it is an immunological precaution.” [Eco, 1997] (emphasis, mine)

It is in this sense that we must face The Terror of History. I want to go in a different direction for a moment just to set the background for the discussion of “time,” our next important topic. Time, of course, is what we talk about when we discuss history. The history of mankind, when considered objectively, is a terrible thing. Many people defend themselves from this terror by erecting elaborate defenses – “personal myths,” so to speak – so that they can go on with the prosaic business of their lives without being paralyzed by the burden of the “cold hard facts of life.” Dealing with this subject is difficult, but the Terror must be faced. I ask the reader to travel with me through this “haunted forest” of thorns and wild beasts because, only after such a “test” of strength and incorruptibility is one granted the gift of a glimpse of the Grail.

Man, as a rule and in general, is powerless against cosmic catastrophes, military onslaughts, social injustice, personal and familial misfortunes, and a host of assaults against his existence too numerous to list. Death and destruction come to all, both rich and poor, free and slave, young and old, good and evil, with an arbitrariness and insouciance that, when contemplated even momentarily, can destroy the most carefully constructed “personal myth.” This is a FACT, and, to quote don Juan, “a damn scary one!”

Over and over again, man has seen his fields and cattle laid waste by drought and disease, his loved ones tormented and decimated by illness or human cruelty, his life’s work reduced to nothing in an instant by events over which he has no control at all.

The study of history through its various disciplines offers a view of mankind that is almost insupportable. The rapacious movements of hungry tribes, invading and conquering and destroying in the darkness of prehistory; the barbarian invaders of the civilized world during medieval times, the bloodbaths of the crusades of Catholic Europe against the “infidels” of the Middle East; the stalking “noonday terror” of the Inquisition where martyrs quenched the flames with their blood and the raging holocaust of modern genocide; wars, famine, pestilence; all produce an intolerable sense of indefensibility against what Mircea Eliade calls the Terror of History.

There are those who will say that NOW this is all past; mankind has entered a new phase; science and technology have brought us to the brink of ending all this suffering. Many people believe in the myth of Science which postulates that man is evolving; society is evolving; and that we now have control over the arbitrary evil of our environment. That which does not support this idea is reinterpreted or ignored.

It is assumed that not only have we evolved as human beings from some primate ancestor, but that we are evolving as a culture as well. Science has given us the space program, laser, television, penicillin, sulfa-drugs, and a host of other useful developments which would seem to make our lives more tolerable and fruitful. However, we can easily see that this is not the case. After three centuries of domination by science, it could be said that never before has man been so precariously poised on the brink of such total destruction.

Our lives, as individuals and groups and cultures, are steadily deteriorating. The air we breathe and the water we drink is polluted almost beyond endurance. Our foods are loaded with substances which contribute very little to nourishment, and may, in fact, be injurious to our health. Stress and tension have become an accepted part of life and can be shown to have killed millions. Hatred, envy, greed and strife multiply exponentially. Crime increases nine times faster than the population. We swallow endless quantities of pills to wake up, go to sleep, get the job done, calm our nerves and make us feel good. The inhabitants of the earth spend more money on recreational drugs than they spend on housing, clothing, food, education or any other product or service. (This amounts to half a trillion dollars annually.)

And, the ancient evils are still with us for those who emerge from their “personal myth” long enough to be in touch with reality. Drought, famine, plague and natural disasters still take a annual toll in lives and suffering. Combined with wars, insurrections, and political purges, this means that not only are great numbers of people killed each year for political reasons, but multiplied millions of people across the globe are without adequate food or shelter. Over one hundred million children have starved to death in the last decade of the 20th century.

When man contemplates history, AS IT IS, he is forced to realize that he is in the iron grip of an existence that seems to have no real care or concern for his pain and suffering. Over and over again, the same sufferings fall upon mankind multiplied millions upon millions of times over millennia. The totality of human suffering is a dreadful thing. I could write until the end of the world using oceans of ink and forests of paper, and never fully convey this Terror.

The beast of arbitrary calamity has always been with us. For as long as human hearts have pumped hot blood through their too-fragile bodies and glowed with the inexpressible sweetness of life and yearning for all that is good and right and loving, the sneering, stalking, drooling and scheming beast of unconscious evil has licked its lips in anticipation of its next feast of terror and suffering.

Since the beginning of time, this mystery of the estate of man, this Curse of Cain has existed. And, since the Ancient of Days, the cry has been: “My punishment is greater than I can bear!”

It is conjectured that, in ancient times, when man perceived this intolerable and incomprehensible condition in which he found his existence, that he created cosmogonies to justify all the “cruelties, aberrations, and tragedies of history.”

Mircea Eliade, who wrote extensively about “The Terror of History,” asks:

“For our purpose, only one question concerns us: How can the ‘terror of history’ be tolerated from the viewpoint of historicism? Justification of a historical event by the simple fact that it is a historical event… by the simple fact that it ‘happened that way,’ will not go far toward freeing humanity from the terror that the event inspires.

” …We should wish to know… how it would be possible to tolerate, and to justify, the sufferings and annihilations of so many peoples who suffer and are annihilated for the simple reason that their geographical situation sets them in the pathway of history; that they are neighbors of empires in a state of permanent expansion. How justify… the fact that southeastern Europe had to suffer for centuries – and hence to renounce any impulse toward a higher historical existence, toward spiritual creation on the universal plane – for the sole reason that it happened to be on the road of the Asiatic invaders and later the neighbor of the Ottoman Empire? And in our day, when historical pressure no longer allows any escape, how can man tolerate the catastrophes and horrors of history – from collective deportations and massacres to atomic bombings – if beyond them he can glimpse no sign, no transhistorical meaning; if they are only the blind play of economic, social, or political forces, or, even worse, only the result of the ‘liberties’ that a minority takes and exercises directly on the stage of universal history?

“…In the past, humanity has been able to endure the sufferings we have enumerated: they were regarded as a punishment inflicted by God, the syndrome of the decline of the ‘age,’ and so on. And it was possible to accept them precisely because they had a metahistorical meaning…

“…By virtue of this view, tens of millions of men were able, for century after century, to endure great historical pressures without despairing, without committing suicide or falling into that spiritual aridity that always brings with it a relativistic or nihilistic view of history.”[Eliade, 1954]

Eliade’s view is that the religious myths of man were created as a “defense against the Terror of History.”

And, at the deepest level, these defenses against history have to do with Time. The religious myths are numerous and varied, but, when all the trappings are stripped away, the chief point of argument is which conception of Time is being utilized as the foundation of the myth: cyclical or linear.

There are those who say that the mythical/religious formulas and images through which the “primitives” expressed their reality seem childish and absurd. Eliade, however, sees in religious myths a “desperate effort not to lose contact with being” (justification of existence in the face of the cruel world) and to find meaning – an archaic ontology.

I would like to suggest that this archaic ontology is a remnant of the high and different science and technology of man “before the fall.”

Jessie L. Weston writes:

“The more closely one studies pre-Christian Theology, the more strongly one is impressed with the deeply and daringly spiritual character of its speculations, and the more doubtful it appears that such teaching can depend upon the unaided processes of human thought, or can have been evolved from such germs as we find among the supposedly ‘primitive’ peoples… Are they really primitive? Or are we dealing, not with the primary elements of religion, but with the disjecta membra of a vanished civilization? Certain it is that so far as historical evidence goes our earliest records point to the recognition of a spiritual, not of a material, origin of the human race.

“Students of the Grail literature cannot fail to have been impressed by a certain atmosphere of awe and mystery which surrounds that enigmatic Vessel. There is a secret connected with it, the revelation of which will entail dire misfortune on the betrayer. …It is so secret a thing that no woman, be she wife or maid, may venture to speak of it. …There is no doubt that the Grail was something secret, mysterious and awful, the exact knowledge of which was reserved to a select few.

“…The Nature Cults still remain reliable guides; it is their inner, their esoteric, ritual which will enable us to bridge the gulf between what appears at first sight the wholly irreconcilable elements of Folk-tale and high Spiritual mystery.” [Weston, 1920]

I would like to suggest that the myths, rituals and ceremonies of the ancient religions are but surviving fragments of a technology from which the true significance has vanished. Further, I would like to suggest that it is in discovering the secrets of this “technology” that mankind has a chance to become free of the Terror of History.

What is the secret technology? It is nothing less than the Holy Grail.